Pentagon Papers: still paying the price for self-serving secrecy

Lies were the foundation of United States policy in Vietnam.

Four successive presidential administrations deceived the public, members of Congress, and those who served in the US military about the costs of the war and the likelihood of success.

The government’s self-serving rationale was later revealed in a 1965 document: 70% of the US ambition was ‘to avoid a humiliating US defeat’. Another goal was ‘to emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used’.

The decades of deception began unraveling with the historic leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The papers, classified ‘top secret’ and officially called the ‘Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force’, chronicle America’s historic military loss, and ‘foreshadow the mind-set and miscalculations’ that influenced America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decades later.

The leak was a watershed moment in 20th-century American history that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedom, the founding of the White House ‘plumbers’ unit that would culminate in the Watergate break-in scandal, and President Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation

Perhaps an equally important legacy is that leaking information the government purports is classified can be an act of patriotism.

The leak

Leaking the papers to the press wasn’t Daniel Ellsberg’s first choice. Ellsberg, who had worked on the report, initially tried to convince several anti-war senators to enter the study into the Congressional Record so it might become public, or to hold hearings on the findings. But none did.

Ellsberg eventually determined that the only way for the public to see the report was to go to the press. And in March 1971, he began leaking portions of the study to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

The Times’ first report on the Pentagon Papers appeared on its front page on 13 June 1971, right next to an article about the wedding of Nixon’s daughter.

Nixon claimed he didn’t read the first article, perhaps because the study concluded in 1968, a year before he took office. But the president, whose administration was already antagonistic towards the press, quickly became obsessed with the idea that it might lead to leaks that would reveal his own activities.

Supreme Court and the Espionage Act

The Times published two additional articles before the Nixon administration, citing vague national security concerns, asked the Supreme Court to issue a prior restraint injunction to prevent further publication.

In under two weeks, the case moved from a district court to an appeals court and, ultimately, to the Supreme Court. During this time, The Washington Post began publishing its own series on the Pentagon Papers, and the court agreed to hear the cases jointly.

The Nixon administration’s hypocrisy towards the press throughout the Pentagon Papers trial is well explained in an affidavit submitted by Times‘ Washington bureau chief, Max Frankel.

Frankel noted that ‘the Government and its officials regularly and routinely misuse and abuse the “classification” of information, either by imposing secrecy where none is justified or by retaining it long after the justification has become invalid, for simple reasons of political or bureaucratic convenience’.

‘To hide mistakes of judgment, to protect reputations of individuals, to cover up the loss and waste of funds, almost everything in government is kept secret for a time’

In other words, the root of the Nixon administration’s anger was not that the secrets had been divulged, but that they had not been divulged in a way advantageous to the president.

The court ruled 6-3 that publishing excerpts of the papers could continue. In so doing, it placed the First Amendment and press freedom over the government’s classification claims.

The Nixon administration didn’t stop after failing to censor the press. It also went after Ellsberg, charging him and his colleague Anthony Russo under the Espionage Act – not for leaking information to damage the US, but for informing the public about the government’s activities.

It was the first time a source for a journalist had been charged under the law.

The administration also targeted the Times’ Sheehan under the Espionage Act. It convened a grand jury and investigated the reporter for over a year, but, as former Times Vice Chairman and General Counsel James Goodale notes, the government had to abandon the case ‘thanks to the efforts of many First Amendment lawyers and the witnesses’ outright refusal to testify’.

Unfortunately, the Sheehan grand jury records are still secret, 50 years later.

Nixon’s paranoia ultimately undermined the case against Ellsberg. He formed the ‘plumbers’ unit to investigate and stop any leaks, and one of their first steps was burglarising the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for evidence.

Members of the unit later participated in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, which came to light during the Watergate investigation, as did the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, forcing the judge to dismiss the case.

Ongoing secrecy

While much of the study was published in the early 1970s, secrecy surrounding the entire study persisted for four decades.

Agencies kept thousands of pages needlessly secret, refusing to respond to declassification requests about the material, even after Erwin Griswold, the Solicitor General who argued the case for the government before the court, admitted that the case for secrecy was baseless.

‘I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat,’ Griswold said, going on to note, ‘It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.’

The secrecy was so nonsensical that when Timothy Naftali, the former Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, tried to curate a historically-accurate Watergate exhibit (which the Nixon Foundation complained was ‘unfair and distorted’), he was told that even the blue cover of the report was classified.

The full 7 000 pages weren’t available in their entirety until the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) coordinated their release in 2011. Even then, NARA staffers had to spend months negotiating with ‘about a dozen government agencies’ to declassify the remainder of the study.

The legacy

As monumental as the Pentagon Papers were, Times editor RW Apple argued that their release did not have an impact on the way ‘the government conducts its business’.

Of the government’s refusal to learn from past mistakes, Ellsberg said, ‘It seems to me that what the Pentagon Papers really demonstrated 40 years ago was the price of … letting a small group of men in secret in the executive branch make these decisions – initiate them secretly, carry them out secretly and manipulate Congress, and lie to Congress and the public as to why they’re doing it and what they’re doing – is a recipe for, a guarantee of Vietnams and Iraqs and Libyas, and in general foolish, reckless, dangerous policies.’

We are still paying that price. But it would be considerably steeper without whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and those who follow in his footsteps to expose the truth behind the government’s self-serving secrecy.

• Ellsberg was a co-founder and board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) for over a decade. He died on 16 June 2023 at the age of 92
• Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, a position established to honour and continue the legendary whistleblower’s fight for secrecy reform. She joins FPF after a decade fighting excessive government secrecy with Washington DC-based non-profit the National Security Archive, where she served as public policy director and helped historians, journalists and the public win the declassification of historically significant government documents
• This article was first published here